Global steel giants ArcelorMittal (MT) and Posco are leading $80 billion in planned spending in India, an investment that would vault the country ahead of Japan as the second-biggest steelmaker. There's one hurdle: India's farmers and their water supply. The farmers refuse to move from irrigated land in three states that hold more than half of India's reserves of iron ore, a key material used in the making of steel....
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Speculation and the economics of hunger by Biraj Patnaik
A recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, provides a damning indictment of the role of speculation in food commodities in fuelling the global food crisis. The report – 'Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crisis – was released on the eve of an emergency meeting of the UN-FAO on the instability in agricultural markets. The global food crisis in 2007-08 led to...
More »Orissa cuts dependancy on FCI, targets 32 lakh tonne rice
The Orissa government has set a target of procuring 32 lakh tonne of rice this time despite bad weather, reducing dependance on the Food Corporation of India (FCI), official sources said today.The decision not to wholly depend on the FCI was taken at a cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik here last night."As performance of FCI was not satisfactory in 2009, the state government decided to reduce target...
More »FCI not to make direct payment to farmers
Commission agents to start procuring for Central agency from today Bowing to the pressure exerted by the powerful lobby of commission agents, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) has decided to withdraw its directive to make direct payment to farmers in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. Union Agriculture and Food Minister Sharad Pawar, who was in Chandigarh on Monday, had a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and Food and...
More »Forever Stuck in a Cycle of Debt and Death by Uddalak Mukherjee
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...
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